


The Means for Making Monsters

by ProbablyPyrite



Category: Black Sails, The Old Guard (Movie 2020), Treasure Island & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action, Background Nicky/Joe, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Don't worry he gets better, Episode Related, Gen, Hurt!Flint, Immortal!Flint, Light Angst, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Self-Destructive Tendencies, Temporary Character Death, The Old Guard in the Province of Carolina
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25557520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProbablyPyrite/pseuds/ProbablyPyrite
Summary: Flint doesn’t exactly escape from Charles Town in one piece, leading him to discover something new and strange about his own limitations—and an eventual confrontation with an even stranger trio.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw & Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Captain Flint | James McGraw & John Silver, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 65
Kudos: 85





	1. This Time the One

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to my sister, who loves Black Sails and the Old Guard even more than I do!
> 
> Warning that the temporary (major) character death occurs in this chapter.

Charles Town burned, and shattered, and screamed in a long, ugly death throe.

Flint could scarcely appreciate it. Rage billowed and blistered up his throat like the black plumes of smoke from Charles Town’s stores, houses, steeple. It left little room for any other thought or emotion.

A benefit, most likely. The swing of his sword and the flexion of his trigger finger were mechanical and weighted by the chains. He followed on Vane’s heels without fully processing his surroundings. A wall—a partial wall, now, in a spray of stone and a blow like concentrated thunder. Men, pushing and shoving. Women. A child being dragged.

Reach the city’s walls. Get to the jetty. Get to the ship.

They drummed against his skull with every breath and step. Recursive, but grounding.

Vane pressed against the slumped corner of a building, signaled Flint to wait. A group of militiamen rushed by without stopping. Vane paused long enough to peek into the alley and wave an all-clear to Flint before hurrying on.

The militia had not spotted them. But they weren’t the only ones in Charles Town who could use a flintlock—or who recognized either their faces or their chains.

Another small blessing, Flint would later think: At least Vane didn’t see him get shot.

The report of the flintlock slipped beneath the cannons and collapsing bricks. It didn’t register until after the hit—a slam into his midsection with the force of an iron rod to the stomach. Flint staggered. One hand scrabbled at the wall for balance; the other leveled his own pistol on thoughtless instinct.

Disheveled blond hair, dusty jacket. No militiaman; a regular townsman. Glaring—or squinting—among the debris.

One pull of the trigger, and he gained a third eye to glare with.

Flint tucked the pistol into his belt and clamped his arm around his middle. Each second that pounded by drew back the hazy veil of shock just a little bit more. His lower left side began to smolder, white-hot, forge-hot. A coal lodged beneath his flesh, oddly chill wetness over the skin of his stomach and down the waist of his trousers.

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t. Flint forced his feet to move, sword clenched in his free hand.

Get to the jetty. Get to the ship.

The broad silhouette of Vane reappeared ahead of him, farther down the street and framed in a doorway. “Come on!” he shouted. Flint kept his arms low and pressed as much to his abdomen as he could while jogging through a devastated colonial street.

Get to the jetty. Get to the ship. Get to the jetty. Get to the ship.

It nearly had a rhythm; a metronome tick-ticking behind his temples.

Vane’s sharp eyes maybe noticed the blood. Maybe not. Either way, he wisely chose not to comment and led them at a brisk pace once more until they were ducking through the city’s perimeter wall and onto the jetty. A rowboat was lashed to a stump of a pillar.

Directly above them, tremendous _booms_ vibrated through the stone wall and scattered dust upon their heads. They flinched in tandem, before Vane ran to the boat and threw the rope free of it.

“They’ve retaken their cannons,” he said.

Flint didn’t think it warranted a reply; he didn’t quite have the energy to construct one, anyway. He dropped into the boat next to Vane and took up an oar. It fumbled in his grip. He clenched his teeth, compelled to lift his arm from his middle to dip the oar into the waves.

This would not be pleasant.

He heaved against the oar. The effort tore down his side in a lightning bolt of agony. He tried to rely purely on his shoulders, but each stroke lanced into his side no matter his desperate adjustments.

A blast of spray, no more than a few arms’ lengths from Vane. The cannonball’s impact splattered water down them both; Vane more so than Flint, but it was becoming difficult to gauge. Flint’s entire left side felt wet.

They were retreating from the jetty, sure enough—but their angle of retreat was slightly askew. The natural result when one oar achieved more reach and power than the other.

Vane would have been a fool not to notice.

“You’re injured,” he said through heavy breaths, almost an accusation.

“It’s nothing. And it won’t matter if we sink. Now _row_.”

Just a little more, he told himself. The smoke and mist were so thick over the waves, Flint felt almost disconnected from the puny boat. Almost as if he were watching his arms struggle with the oar from over his own shoulder. Just a little longer. A little more.

All at once, a cacophony of explosions—a volley of guns fired at once.

Not from the wall of Charles Town, though. From behind Flint and Vane. From the man o’ war.

Beside him, Vane’s shoulder brushed against his as Vane laughed, short and breathy.

Flint watched the man o’ war’s shots breech the parapet of Charles Town’s perimeter wall. How they struck down the shrinking figures that’d been scuttling about the cannons like insects. He watched the smoke swell from the spot until they neared the man o’ war and the cries of its crewmen.

Vane set his oar aside and, after a moment, took Flint’s from his unresisting fingers as well. Flint felt himself being studied. He didn’t care; he panted for air and folded his arm over his side.

A hand crossed his line of sight. Flint stared; considered. But he didn’t have much choice, did he?

He took it. Vane hauled him upright as if his weight were trivial. His clasped hand was guided towards the pilot ladder that hung over the side of the ship.

Before Flint could contemplate beginning that climb, Vane leaned in and said lowly—despite the impossibility of being overheard—“Have your doctor take a look at you; you look like shit. I didn’t fetch you from that square only to drop you into the sea later on.”

He sent him a withering look. “Your opinion is noted,” he ground out, then pulled himself onto the ladder.

Every passing rung might as well have been drawn out of his own intestines. His side throbbed senselessly. It seemed both too long and too short of a time had elapsed before hands were on him, helping him onto the deck.

He straightened, braced against the rail. Resolutely ignored the shaking in his legs. His eyes landed on Billy, pushing through the crew to meet him, and Mr. Scott, hanging back. “Take us back to the sandbar,” he ordered. “Southwest corner of the bay. We’ll start from there.” To the deck at large, he shouted, “Ready the guns! Full complement.”

Billy halted beside him, bemused crinkle between his brows. “What’s the target, Captain?” The crinkle deepened into a furrow. “Are you _bleeding_?”

Flint dismissed the second question. As for the first—he felt his lip pull into a sneer.

“Whatever’s left.”

* * *

He’d tried to do what he could. Tried to have it seen to.

He’d left command to Mr. Scott and descended below decks, but he was soon stopped outside Dr. Howell’s usual operating area by a cluster of crew members. A man caught his eye and cringed, broke away from the group to approach Flint like a heeled dog.

Beyond their ring, a choked-off sob and a muffled scream.

“What is this?” Flint demanded. Tried not to lean against a post for support. Tried to keep the man’s blurring and indistinguishable features in focus.

“It’s Mr. Silver, sir,” he said, quiet in spite of the commotion. “It’s his leg.”

He recounted the events of the ship while Flint was ashore—the bits he knew enough to tell, at any rate. The rest, Flint could puzzle out for himself. He closed his eyes after yet another scream.

The crewman’s voice brought him back to awareness. “Captain? Sir? Are you well? Do you need the doctor, sir?”

How long had Flint been standing there?

“No,” he managed. Noticed the direction of the crewman’s gaze and tightened his arm over the darkened splotch on his already-dark coat and shirt. “That won’t be necessary. It’s a scratch. Fetch me some bandages and cloth, and I’ll see to it myself.”

The man nodded and squirmed his way through the crowd to do as he was told. When he returned, Flint took the items from him, retired to his cabin—meant to lock the door, but somewhere between the doorway and his chair—the bandages dropping from his fingers—a speckled trail of red in his wake—he realized he’d forgotten.

He’d tried. He’d meant to try.

He had no reason to try anymore.

Flint sank into his chair. He listened to the man o’ war’s guns, sounding off in a steady thrum. It nearly reassured him: the coasts of the colony were burning even as he sat there, the bullet burning within him. The colony bled even as he bled. It suffered even as he suffered.

It would never suffer enough.

His eyes closed. He hadn’t meant to shut them; the cannons lulled them closed, perhaps. That, or the temporary respite from responsibility. The bubble of quiet inside his cabin.

Flint’s arm drooped away from his side.

Time faded in and out. Suddenly, a strange noise commanded his attention. Noteworthy only, perhaps, in its being out of place. Different from the blended clamor in the background. One he wouldn’t expect to ever hear in this room again.

The gentle swishing of skirts. And beneath that—a thready sound—

_Tick_.

_Tick_.

_Tick_.

It took more strength than he had to pry his eyelids open. For a moment, he wasn’t sure he’d succeeded. Pitch-like darkness cloyed at the edges of his vision. But in the center, the darkness seemed to have substance. A shape?

His mouth formed her name. His lips, his tongue, all felt heavy and cold. But his voice died in his throat.

A blank expanse of dull, ash-black sackcloth hovered a handspan above him—where a face should have been on the shrouded figure. Faceless, colorless, soundless too, were it not for a low, ragged rush that encircled the room and dulled everything else—breathing?—

He drew a sharp breath through his nose. Rot dizzied his senses. He gagged, labored for another breath. A whisper of air made its way to his lungs.

His gasps grew slower. And slower. His hands wouldn’t respond. He couldn’t break his gaze.

Its head seemed to tilt. Regarding him.

The darkness seeped inward from the margins. Intermingled, seamlessly, with the thing draped in black. Flint could not discern where it began or ended.

Did it end? Did it ever end?

He chased the thought into the dark until he thought no more.

* * *

_Woods._

_Three strangers. All people he couldn’t name._

_A woman in trousers. Dark hair. Eyes of ice. Crouched to the leaf litter and dirt. Cradling something in her palm._

_The broken shaft of an arrow._

_Snatches of words. Two men. Each carrying a sword broader, stouter than modern blades._

_“I saw a steeple, falling to cannons—”_

_“Colonists fleeing—”_

_“It looked like Charles Town.”_

_She stands. In her other hand, a strangely compact double-headed axe._

_“Good,” she says simply. “Let them run.”_

* * *

_Closeness; metal, surrounding; pressure a leaden block on every limb, crushing the chest._

_Salt_ _stings the eyes and nostrils. Water flows like a current: through the mouth, down the throat, pooling in the lungs._

_A slit in the metal that allows no light, no vision. Just the depthless blue of an aging bruise._

_In a few seconds, it’s over._

_In a few seconds, it starts again._

_Water down the throat, water in the lungs—_

* * *

He sucked in a breath and choked.

His whole body jerked, hunched in on itself as he coughed, _breathed_ , and struggled to move.

A hand clasped his upper arm. Over the roaring in his ears, he finally made sense of what were voices.

“What happened—?”

“I don’t know, I swear, I walked in and he weren’t breathin’ or nothin’! He weren’t nothin’!”

The first voice was familiar. He waited, adjusted to the sensations: sitting, the lurch of his pulse in his chest and against his throat; the tension of muscles as his hands clenched and unclenched; the texture of his clothes against his skin; the dried crust lining his left side.

Flint opened his eyes. Billy stared back from where he knelt beside the chair in Flint’s cabin.

“Captain?” he broached, oddly tentative. Hesitated, then said over his shoulder, “Go tell Dr. Howell; he might spare a man or two to help.”

“Yes, sir.” The other voice—belonging to a crewman Flint couldn’t immediately identify—fled the room.

Flint observed his departure, struck by the man’s movement, the subtle sway of the ship, the light and color of the cabin. The faint sounds echoing from beyond it: men’s cries, the guns.

“Captain.” Billy squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to check your wound, all right? We have to stop the bleed.”

Bleed? He didn’t have a clue what Billy was so concerned about. Flint rested his head back against his chair, exhausted beyond all measure merely by his survey of the room.

Billy took his silence as permission. Carefully Billy tugged open his coat, his shirt, honing in on the left side’s dark stain. Under his breath he muttered, “Why didn’t you tell anybody it was as bad as this—”

He cut himself short. Then, “What the fuck.”

That response piqued some of Flint’s lingering curiosity. He craned his neck to peer at his own abdomen and soon found himself matching Billy’s bewilderment.

Blood encrusted the entire area of entry. The lead ball had ripped through his shirt on his lower left, had ruptured skin; Flint was under no illusion that it had by some miracle avoided an organ. He thus expected a degree of viscera in addition to the open wound and the blood.

But there was nothing. Or rather, there was something where there _should_ have been nothing. Where there once had gaped a hole in his midsection, there was smooth skin; sealed, closed-up flesh. Dried blood adorning it, but no fresh blood flowing from it.

And caught in the ruined folds of his shirt—a reddened lead ball.

Flint wracked his memory. It swam behind his eyes, fluid and confused as the sea. He’d been shot—he knew he had been, of that he was _certain_ —

In the face of Billy’s stare, Billy’s mounting trepidation—fear?—Flint swallowed hard over the dry lump in his throat and said, voice cracking, “Must’ve gotten lucky.”

Billy’s wide eyes met his. The boy was too clever by half to attribute this to _luck_.

And the both of them had eyes on the evidence: the torn shirt where the bullet had entered, had to have entered. Flint recalled the blow like a fist to his stomach. It had been no mere graze.

Yet what other explanation was there?

Billy sat back on his heels, letting the shirt and coat fall back in place. His expression had pinched. “Captain, did the ball, er, dislodge itself, or—?”

Flint planted his hands on the chair and pushed himself to his feet. Billy scrambled to stand as well. His hands were outstretched, ready to catch Flint should he stumble. Flint did his damnedest to master his trembling muscles into steadiness.

That simple motion already shortened his breath. Even so, Flint snarled, “It doesn’t matter now, does it? I told you, it was a minor thing.”

“But you weren’t . . . awake.” Billy’s throat bobbed. It took little wondering to imagine what words he would rather swallow than speak.

“Obviously a passing moment; lightheadedness perhaps. I’m fine.”

He didn’t, couldn’t continue to discuss it. He strode past Billy and went to the deck. The more he walked, the surer his steps became. When he arrived at the rail and could witness the carnage currently raining down on Carolina’s coast in full clarity, Flint felt completely whole and sure. No weakness; no instability; no pain.

Never mind it seemed to him he stood before a precipice rather than upon the deck of his ship.

Every burst of the cannons reverberated through the soles of his boots and against his ribs. He eased his breaths to mirror a particular cannon or two’s regular rhythm of load-fire-reload.

Load-fire-reload. Tick.

Load-fire-reload-tick.

Load-fire-tick.

Tick.

Tick.

His fingers dug into the wood. His fingernails bit into it.

Firmly, Flint schooled his gaze on the shoreline’s distant fires and did not waver. Did not turn. Would not look.

The spray that misted over his face seemed, somehow, to burn.


	2. The Illuminated Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Captain Flint raids and rages against the colonial powers, he begins to realize he may not be as alone in his endeavors as he once thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thank-you to everyone for reading and leaving feedback and kudos on the first chapter!! I’m thrilled to know people are enjoying this fic and have loved hearing from everyone! I have a buffer of about one chapter so will try to keep the updates coming. :) 
> 
> Note: We’re tracking with early season 3 Flint’s headspace, but just to be safe, I’d like to warn for at least mildly self-destructive tendencies (e.g., risk-taking) in this chapter and probably for most of the story from here on out.

It was a trick of the light.

Of course it was; the harsh, limited spread of candlelight against the encroachment of outdoor gloom played a game of resemblances. A similar wound, perhaps, but the bodies were nothing alike in appearances. Not even the same color of hair. It didn’t signify anything.

In the upper bedroom of the magistrate Hazzard and his wife, Flint blinked hard against echoes and ghosts. The vacant eyes of Mrs. Hazzard stared steadily back.

But for a moment, they had appeared to be _hers_.

Flint stowed his pistol back into his coat and tore himself away from the magistrate’s room. From the rathole of yet another of “civilization’s” proponents, one who’d orchestrate order by the straight lines of gallows. One who would presume to _try_ after the examples Flint had made of Bridgetown, St. Kitts, Martinique, Nevis—all magistrates who’d rendered a capital punishment for piracy. All, eventually, paid a nighttime visit much like this.

He paused halfway down the stone stairwell. The torches provided sufficient illumination here, while the walls enclosing the stairs prevented any potential onlookers.

For speaking of _capital_ punishments . . .

Flint winced as he pulled both coat and shirt up to reveal his ribcage, his chest. The ragged slash from sternum to right hip—what had nearly cut him open and spilled him across the cobble street beneath the magistrate’s house, were it not for Billy and a moment of exceptional marksmanship—was nothing more than a hair-thin slice. And that, too, was closing.

The colonial regulars were a surprise, but they were not necessarily any more talented than any number of militiamen or irate townsmen they’d faced in the past. The man who’d crossed swords with Flint had just been lucky enough to slip through his defenses.

Or maybe Flint was becoming a little bit careless.

Hard to care, really, as he could now stand and watch his wounds knit themselves together before his very eyes, disappearing into unblemished skin. Not even a scar left behind.

Flint resituated his clothes and wrapped his black-cloth mask about his face once more. The pain was, as usual, already gone. Between that and the night’s darkness, he hoped to avoid any probing questions or pointed glances.

Alas, this was Billy Bones he was dealing with.

He was overseeing the men as they hauled plundered supplies to the _Walrus_ when he heard Flint’s approach. He turned, gave Flint a cursory once-over, and said, “All right?”

“Fine,” he answered, clipped. Billy was eyeing his torso as if he could see the tear and bloodstains of his shirt, even though Flint had made sure to arrange his coat more securely about himself. Perhaps Billy had witnessed the blow land before firing his flintlock.

Flint should’ve tied him to the ship and not brought him on the vanguard again. Especially after Nevis. Billy had always been skeptical, but it’d only been getting worse since Charles Town. Flint was definitely getting careless in that regard, at least.

Either way, by some small mercy, Billy didn’t press. Flint resumed command of the resupply, and within the hour, the _Walrus_ had disappeared back into the night.

* * *

“You’re going through a lot of shirts lately.”

Flint shot an annoyed look over his desk. “What, are you rifling through my laundry now?”

John Silver made his way across the cabin, each step punctuated by the irregular _thump_ of the metal peg leg. Without so much as a by-your-leave, he propped a hip up on the corner of Flint’s desk and settled in for what boded to be an intolerable, mostly one-sided conversation.

“Horrendous rips in them,” Silver continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “And punctures. And the stains! No amount of soap is going to remove them, I’m sorry to report.”

“I’m sure I’ll manage.” He buried himself in his logbook again. But of course Silver remained undeterred by the dismissal.

“Yes, that’s what’s interesting. Very interesting, in fact. You see, I couldn’t help but notice that much of the damage to your clothing occurs over rather vulnerable areas of the body. Areas one could ill-afford to have ripped, or punctured, in order to produce these terrible stains.”

Christ, Flint recognized that honeyed tone, its seemingly idle curiosity. His hand clenched around his quill.

“And yet, imagine my surprise when I consult with Dr. Howell, who claims he hasn’t even seen you, much less treated you for so much as a splinter, in weeks.”

Flint risked a glance up from his books. A miscalculation—Silver’s expression was steely.

“ _Weeks_ ,” he iterated.

“He’s exaggerating,” Flint tried. Silver crossed his arms, an eyebrow raised.

“Is he? That’s a relief. Of course this must mean you’ve somehow been avoiding grisly harm during every single raid, or else you’ve been hiding an apothecary somewhere in your cabin. Oh, but wait—” and he actually turned his head this way and that, the bastard, pretending to examine the room, “there _are_ no medical supplies in here, are there? And I’m not sure how one gets blood all over oneself if harm is being avoided entirely.”

Silver allowed that verbal entrapment to stretch between them for a moment. Flint hadn’t planned on being so thoroughly cornered this evening and so spent that moment floundering with his thoughts.

He didn’t think Silver knew the truth; for one thing, the truth was an absurdity and a half. For another, he trusted that Billy wouldn’t share what happened that day in Flint’s cabin with anyone. Billy and Silver didn’t maintain the easiest rapport, and Billy risked being labeled deranged should he ever say out loud, _“Oh right, couple weeks back the captain nearly died of a hole to the gut, but I guess not even the devil wants his mean ol’ soul ’cause he shat the bullet right back out.”_

Not fucking likely.

“Obviously it isn’t all mine,” Flint settled on. “The blood. I’ve had my share of near-misses, but if it were anything as dire as you make it out to be, I wouldn’t be sitting here, now would I?”

He suppressed an almost overwhelming sense of irony.

Silver studied him. He couldn’t imagine what he saw. But finally, Silver said, more softly, “This crew, your campaign against the colonial powers-that-be—our war for Nassau—all hinge upon you living long enough to _stay_ in that chair. We’ve been assigned responsibility for raids we were nowhere near—we’ve made Captain Flint the name of grim death to all of them, and they are _terrified_. But what happens if Captain Flint falls during a random raid on a no-name beach town? What happens if Captain Flint succumbs in an instance of entirely preventable recklessness?”

He scowled. “Is that what you think this is? I’m being ‘reckless’?”

A scoff. Silver fidgeted where he sat, getting more comfortable. “I _think_ there were colonial regulars at the last raid. I _think_ the colonies are adapting and becoming increasingly dangerous, and I _think_ you are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge it. Quite the opposite, you seem to be throwing yourself at them even harder.”

Silver drew a breath, as if to brace himself for what he would say next. Flint already decided he disliked whatever it would be. “I understand this hasn’t been easy,” Silver said. “How personal this all is. How much the loss of Mrs. Barlow has affected you.”

Yes, he mused bitterly. He definitely disliked it.

He had let Silver say his piece for long enough. “Now wait a minute,” he said, but Silver pushed on.

“And I know how it wears on you, the role that you play. You are too crucial of a player. But that’s precisely why you shouldn’t shoulder all of this alone—the burden of it, or the risk.”

“Stop.”

Silver leaned in again, even as his voice dropped. “I’m not going to watch as you keep throwing yourself at the nearest militiaman’s sword.”

“Then shut your goddamn eyes,” Flint snarled.

At last—silence. But Silver’s gaze was unflinching. And judging.

Flint bit back a sigh.

“ _I_ decide our tactics,” he said. “If I want every town that touches the Caribbean to know my presence, and every magistrate to see my face before he dies, then so be it. I know what I’m doing, I am _unhurt_ , and I am at no more risk than anyone else on this crew.

“And you,” he added, “can either accept that or not. I don’t care. Now get off my desk.”

Later, long after Silver had gone, Flint reflected that no, Billy would never tell Silver about Flint’s brush with death that day after Charles Town; Flint trusted in that much at least.

But he supposed he hadn’t accounted for the possibility that Silver would question Billy about what happened during the subsequent raids—or that Silver would possibly notice a pattern emerging.

Careless, indeed.

* * *

A sixth magistrate hadn’t learned the lesson. This suited Flint fine: it was one he would never quite tire of teaching.

Kersey was his name, and he presided over Beaufort Town on Port Royal Island. And as if in solidarity with Hazzard’s stance towards the law, two men were hung for piracy under Kersey’s jurisdiction.

Not many nights later, Flint led the vanguard down Beaufort’s shadowy streets.

Glass snapped; torches went through windows. From inside homes, screams pierced the thick, humid air.

The regulars were deployed here as well. They rushed headlong, now, to meet them. Flint had anticipated this. The colonies were, after all, “adapting.”

Flint’s sword clattered against a regular’s, blade sliding against blade. Flint followed its motion with a sweep of his sword hand, hilt and fist both, into the middle of the man’s face. Bone crunched underneath his knuckles; a gout of blood warmed them.

He shoved the man back enough to arc his sword clear and then angle it through his ribs. A wet gasp reached Flint’s ears. Another push, and his sword was free once more, the body hitting the dirt like a sack of grain.

Though the regulars were present, there weren’t very many of them. The vanguard dealt with the stragglers. An advance group was clearing the street ahead of Flint, opening the path to the magistrate’s residence.

It squatted in the moonlight like an opulent toad—a stout building with too many balconies for its size and the quality of its less fortunate neighbors. Flint thought he saw, for a moment, a light behind one of its upper curtains. When he scanned over the windows again, however, all were darkened.

They were all the same: Kersey. Hazzard. The magistrates of Nevis. Bridgetown. St. Kitts. Martinique. Lording over their subjects; buried inside estates built by the labor of slaves, cowering like rabbits scenting a fox.

Flint signaled Billy and several other men towards the general supply. As for himself, he headed for the magistrate’s door.

Locked, of course. Flint didn’t falter. He kicked it in, disregarded the pain that sparked along his foot, ankle, shin. Refused to even favor the leg—it would resolve itself soon enough.

The house opened into neatly adorned rooms of emptiness and stillness. A central staircase commanded attention, unfolding at its peak into a baluster-lined landing. He could barely spy the outline of doors beyond the landing; bedchambers most likely.

Flint crept up the stairs.

He had just crested the top step when he heard it:

“ _Captain!_ ”

He startled. The shriek had come from outside.

A small open window at one end of the landing, curtains lifeless in the absence of a breeze. Flint hurried as quietly as he could, peered down at the street where the advance group of the vanguard had been holding the line around the magistrate’s home.

They weren’t holding it any longer. A few torches and the brightness of the moon lit the scene but didn’t help Flint understand it.

It was chaos. More bodies were strewn across the street than he cared to count; some belonging to colonial regulars, who hadn’t been there earlier, but many more in the dark plainclothes of his men. He picked out several of his crew who remained on their feet, clashing with a new enemy—reinforcements? From where? The trees, like unwelcome specters?

Difficult to say; the fray of the battle was progressing at a rapid clip, the figures obscured by the gloam and moving too quickly to track. They—

Wait.

Flint narrowed his eyes. With a cut-off cry, another member of the _Walrus_ fell beneath a sword. In the thick of the fight, two men moved unlike any regular Flint had ever encountered, alternately at each other’s sides or at each other’s backs.

There were two of them. Only two.

Yet they’d reduced a sizable portion of the vanguard to a mere handful. A couple of men who weighed their odds and found them lacking. Flint watched, teeth grinding in frustration, as those men turned tail and ran in the direction of the general store—and the docks. Likely to alert Billy and the remaining vanguard of the danger.

The enemy let them go. For a minute, at least. Then they followed at an unconcerned pace.

They passed below the window. Those were not the uniforms of colonial regulars, and those were definitely not commonly made blades.

_Two_.

Two individuals did this. And the raid’s primary goal—here, in this house—had yet to be accomplished.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered.

He needed to hurry.

Flint opened the nearest door. An unoccupied bedroom.

The next. Nothing.

The third, at the far end of the landing. Surely—

The door swung open. The bedroom inside was the largest so far. The bed tidily made up; the candles unlit; the door to the balcony ajar and admitting a stream of moonlight.

The barrel of a gun a handspan from his left temple.

Flint ducked as the pistol fired. The discharge pounded at his ears, dulled them. Missed. He grappled with the man, seized a wrist and _twisted_.

Bone popped. The man howled and yanked against his hold. Flint let him go; he had what he wanted.

The flintlock was warm in his grip. Residual heat from being fired, or from leaving the touch of another?

He pocketed the useless pistol and withdrew his own from his belt. Tugged the black-cloth mask from his face. _Let him see_ , he thought. _Let him know the name of grim death._

He aimed at the quaking outline of a head, bent over its wounded limb. His ears had healed sufficiently to understand its sputtering: “Please, be merciful. Please. Be _reasonable_ —please—”

Soft footsteps near the balcony.

Flint froze. Glanced over to assess. A militiaman? Another unknown attacker?

A woman. Lithe, well-muscled, arms bared. She was backlit by the moonlight, her hands at her sides. Something hung low in her grip—likely a blade of her own.

She stepped further into the room. The light shifted across her face. The eyes that met Flint’s were like chips of ice; her voice, when she spoke, carried an equal chill despite the slight quirk to her lips.

“There you are, pirate king.”

Flint didn’t budge, didn’t lower his pistol from the center of the man’s—Kersey’s—head.

“Is this meant to be a rescue or a parley?” he growled. “I’ll tell you now, neither will work with me.”

She stopped mere strides away, equidistant from both Flint and Kersey—the third point to some inscrutable triangle they had formed. Her head canted towards the man, contemplative. Or only now noticing he was there.

“Oh, please madam,” Kersey choked out. “Please, I beg of you, help m—”

In a blur she closed the gap, the swing of her arm as fluid as a whip. But it was no lash that touched Kersey’s throat. He gurgled, collapsed to his knees, and then to the floor. Damp wheezing—and silence.

It wasn’t a cutlass in the woman’s grip. Flint couldn’t determine its exact nature, but her blow betrayed its heft. A lethality distilled at its end rather than along its length.

Now he adjusted his aim. Otherwise he maintained a mask of stone.

“What is it you want.”

The woman approached. He backed onto the landing, too unhurried to be mistaken for fleeing.

“It isn’t about me _wanting_ anything,” she answered, her tone still casual, as if this were a marketplace encounter and not the bedroom of a murdered magistrate. A magistrate _she_ had murdered. “But it is about you. I’ve heard a lot about you lately. Seems like most of Carolina has.”

“Then you have me at a disadvantage, ma’am.”

“I do.” The lilt of her lips spread; an approximate smile. “Though not as much as you might think. For better or worse, you’ve realized you’ve changed recently, haven’t you? You’re different now than you were before.”

His heels edged over the lip of the stairs. She stood framed in the bedroom’s doorway.

“You have questions,” she continued.

“Not really,” he said.

“You do. Come with me, and you’ll see you’re not the only one like this.”

A glint off her blade—two glints, off twin blades. Double-headed.

It jarred loose a muddled and disconnected vision: woods. Strangers. A conversation he couldn’t follow; something about the colonists, fleeing. Charles Town.

Her now shadowed face coalesced with the one embedded in that memory—that dream. The woman with the ancient-looking axe. The woman he saw in the muddied in-between of death and life.

_Her_.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

She was dodging before it discharged, sparing her head but not her chest. Her body recoiled high, around the collarbone. A hit.

He made to close in, readied his sword. But the gleam of the raised axe gave him pause.

Her breathing had barely changed. She looked down at her wound, prodded at it. Then the clink of lead on wood.

“That wasn’t nice,” she said.

Well, shit.

Flint really wasn’t the only one.

He shifted his stance away rather than towards.

She must have picked up on it, a subtle tell of his body for _flight_ instead of _fight_. She darted forward with serpentine speed. He ducked back, had a second to decide: the stairs, or—?

Too fast; she’d catch him.

He didn’t overthink it. He grabbed the banister and threw himself to the floor below.

He landed with a jolt. His ankle turned, pain lancing up his tendons. He moved through it, half running and half limping for the entrance.

Flint burst onto the street, dashed away from that house. The pain was dissipating, whatever was torn or strained knitting itself together again.

Just in time—a shout. Not in English. Was that . . . Italian? Couldn’t be anyone on his crew.

If he had any crew left in this hellhole. The two men, he remembered. The swordsmen.

He chose an alley away from the main street but oriented in the direction of the docks.

More shouting, closer.

The report of a gun.

And damn it all to the inner circles of hell and back, those bastards’ repertoire wasn’t limited to swords.

The bullet slammed into the back of his right shoulder like a cannonball in miniature. He stumbled at the impact. Shuddered, his skin tingling too cold and too hot.

And then it stabbed him like needles fresh from the furnace, radiating across his shoulder blade, down his arm, up his neck.

He moved through the pain. He had to. Get to the docks; get to the ship. But it was difficult, and he was alone, and for a terrible moment—grunting and gasping with the effort of forcing one foot in front of the other—for a moment, Flint didn’t care what happened next.

He slowed around the corner of a diminutive home—a shack, really—and leaned against a pile of crates. Listened.

But there was no sign of the swordsmen. Nor of the woman.

He gathered himself, debated with himself, for a little over a minute.

All remained quiet. Flint came to his decision with a sigh.

Get to the docks. Get to the ship.

He had an annoying sense of déjà vu.

* * *

Flint was the last of the vanguard to return. Granted, the vanguard had abandoned the docks and he’d had to commandeer a rowboat that wasn’t one of their own launches. But frankly, Flint was astonished that the _Walrus_ had waited for him as long as it had.

Climbing the pilot ladder aggravated his shoulder. Though everything else had recovered decently over the course of the night, this latest injury was being stubborn. With every movement he felt the lead ball grind against bone, shave against muscle, and it pissed him off.

As soon as he set foot on deck, he yelled for them to get underway. But it was a superfluous order. The men, apparently spooked, were several steps ahead of him.

They didn’t seem to require further direction from him at the moment. Good thing: Silver was on him, grabbing him by his upper arms and demanding, “Where _were_ you? Some of the crew had half a mind to—”

He didn’t finish the thought. He retracted his hand from Flint’s right arm. The moon lit across the hand Silver was now staring at—and the dark stains upon his fingers.

Damn it all to hell _again_. Flint forgot how the dampness had seeped down his sleeve.

“It’s fine,” he began, but Silver nudged him into turning partly around. Flint thought about protesting but relented to the inspection. He’d never hear the end of it otherwise.

Although this was, perhaps, a mistake. Silver’s fingers clenched around his arm. “Flint,” he murmured.

Flint had the sinking feeling he could guess what caused this reaction. After all, he could feel it.

In a moment of relative calm, with the energy of battle depleting, Flint could actually track the lead ball’s slow progress: its surfacing, its expulsion through sealing tissue. The brush of Silver’s palm beneath the entry wound, catching the bullet before it hit the deck.

His quickened breathing ghosted over the hole in Flint’s shirt, the patch of new skin. “ _Flint_ ,” he said again, more insistent. “What the hell is this?”

Flint honestly was at a loss. He had no means of putting into words what he himself did not understand, no matter how much he’d taken advantage of it as of late.

_“You have questions . . .”_

The woman.

“I don’t know,” Flint said at last. “But there might be somebody who does.”


	3. Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not even the best-laid plan survives contact with an annoyed Scythian warrior.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always for reading and for all the lovely feedback!! I’m having so much fun with this fic, and it’s wonderful to know that other people are having fun too! ;) Just as a heads-up, though I've been keeping a (roughly) weekly schedule so far, I've just started a new job so the next chapter may be two weeks or so from now.
> 
> The warning for temporary character death still, uh, applies. Sheesh these immortals, am I right??

However his injuries mended themselves, apparently the ability did not extend to exhaustion. Because Flint had been sitting in his chair for over an hour, and the temptation to lay his head down upon his desk and go to sleep had only been growing stronger.

And Silver was asking him yet another question.

“So let me make sure I understand this correctly,” he began—again. “You . . . died. After Charles Town. But you awoke, alive and well. Billy was there. But no one ever thought to tell _me_?” His hands mussed through his long unruly hair. “No, of course not. Not the quartermaster. But fucking _Billy_?”

“Two things,” Flint said, and endeavored to clear away sleep’s mental fog. “One, if I’d had my choice, nobody would’ve been there. Two, as I’ve already said, I was _near_ -death. It’s an incredible form of healing, but it can’t be resurrection.”

Silver looked doubtful. “Gunshot wound to the gut,” he ticked off on his fingers. “Fading consciousness. Supernatural visions. Not breathing.”

Flint glared. “I was breathing. Billy’s just a shit doctor.”

“But how do you know?” Silver didn’t glare back, exactly, but his tone carried its own mulish persistence. “Who’s to say what it is or isn’t? How did it come to you?”

“I don’t know.”

His hands, resting on the desk opposite Flint’s own, clenched into fists. “Can it be shared with others, or is it confined to yourself?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are the limits of this thing?”

He resisted the urge to rub his eyes. “Well,” and he cast his mind over the last few weeks, “breaks, sprains, cuts, abrasions, bullet holes . . .”

Silver went still. Dangerously so. “You’re shitting me,” he said, voice flat. “Of course—the shirts.”

Ah. He’d somewhat incriminated himself just then. “I still wasn’t _reckless_.”

“But you were, what, testing this development? Oh, but wait. ‘Testing’ implies procedures and at least a puny grain of caution, and yet I guarantee you’ve been throwing yourself on flintlocks consequences be damned.”

People _had_ been directing a lot of flintlocks his way lately, but that was hardly his fault. And it was beside the point.

A point he feared had gotten away from them both.

“Listen,” he said, “you know as much as I do, now. Which is more than Billy, more than anyone else. Except—”

“Except for the mystery woman and her two friends,” Silver finished. “Away from whom we’re currently sailing at a rapid rate.”

“Exactly.”

“Who shot you in the back without a fuss. Who slaughtered a third of the vanguard. And who you somehow believe might be willing to help you figure this out.”

“Her words, not mine.” And really, who _wouldn’t_ take a shot at Captain Flint if given the opportunity? If that were a disqualification, there would go half the _Walrus_ ’s crew.

Quartermaster possibly included, if Silver’s long-suffering expression were anything to go by.

But his next question—the hundredth one of the night, surely—wasn’t what Flint expected.

“Will you tell the others?” he asked.

“Others?”

“You know.” An all-encompassing wave of the hand. “Billy, the crew. Captain Vane. Rackham, Max.”

“Good God, no.” The very notion of sharing something so personal with anyone on that list repulsed him.

“Do you have any idea how you’ll explain it to them, then? In the inevitable event you’re injured in the fight for Nassau alongside Vane, or the crew for that matter, or _anyone_ , and they see you walk away from death with merely a ‘not today, no thank you’?”

He didn’t. To be quite honest, he had never even intended on saying anything to Silver. Not until his hand had been forced by accident.

He wouldn’t admit that, though. “Not tonight, I don’t. But you’re good at telling tales. If you’re so worried about their questions, why don’t you contrive an answer for them?”

Silver leaned in, elbows braced on the desk. His smile was sharp. “Oh, I’ll do you one better. I’ll help you find the _real_ explanation. I’ll help you find this mystery woman. But,” he added, pushing off the desk and rising, “you’re right. Not tonight.”

Flint watched Silver slowly cross the cabin. He paused at the door, glanced back. His eyes seemed to appraise Flint in return, a heaviness and intensity to his gaze that made it difficult to parse. “It’s funny,” he said. “How unnatural it is—how some might call it witchery, or demonic. How in many places people hang for peculiarities less than this.”

Flint didn’t see the amusement. Hadn’t made the connection, really; had never put much stock in such things.

Was this thing actually evil? Was it in fact some sort of curse?

Suddenly unsettled as he was, he wasn’t able to pursue the thought much farther before Silver continued, his smile now absent. “And yet, there are just as many who might call it a blessing.”

The rhythmic _thnk_ , _thnk_ of the peg leg receded, and the door shut gently behind him.

* * *

The plan was half-baked at best. Flint had told Silver as much. Silver, naturally, had disagreed.

“I’ve learned a few things from the crew,” he’d said. “Rumors and bits of news that didn’t seem to pertain to us at the time. But it seems we aren’t the only ones to have a quarrel with an English settlement.”

An understatement if Flint had ever heard one. “So?” he’d said.

“So, the Yamasee and allied tribes have been staging attacks against the Carolina settlers for a while now. It’s a war on land that we’ve coincidentally contributed to by sea.”

“And?”

“ _And_ , plantation owners have become so frightened, they’ve fled their own lands. Those in Christ Church Parish have retreated to Charles Town—whatever’s left of it—or, failing that, farther inland to seek refuge with their rector.”

“. . . And?”

Silver had grinned. “A rumor or two—not especially credible to most, mind you, but interesting for our purposes—have mentioned odd individuals participating in the attacks against the settlers. Does a woman with an antique axe sound familiar?”

Flint hadn’t responded beyond a narrowing of the eyes and a quirk of the brow, reluctant to encourage such smugness—even though it was good work.

But Silver apparently took even that minimal reaction as endorsement. He’d continued, practically beaming with suppressed excitement, to lay out the “plan”: “We know they’re in Carolina and that they were able to predict our movements and find you once already. We need to return to Carolina, but we don’t want the crew to sense anything amiss; just another raid. We’ve already paid visits to Charles Town and Beaufort. What’s left that’s also nearby?”

“A plantation,” Flint had finished with a grimace.

From there, it was a matter of narrowing down their targets. Flint recalled from trade notices that had circulated around Nassau that a large number of land warrants had been issued along Christ Church Parish’s coast. One, in particular, had a renowned name attached to it.

Salt Hope. An ironic one, as well.

The night of the raid, the _Walrus_ slid into Bulls Bay with all lights doused. Flint stood on the quarterdeck and studied the vague shadow of the Carolina shoreline.

_Thnk, thnk, thnk_ from behind. “I’m going with you,” said Silver.

Flint considered that for a beat, though he didn’t break his gaze from the shore. “There’ll be a short hike to the house,” he said, as if Silver weren’t already aware. “It’ll be dark.”

“Yes,” Silver said lightly. “That _is_ usually the state of things once the sun goes down.”

Now Flint sent him a scathing look. But Silver shrugged it aside, saying, “Don’t misunderstand. I’m informing you; not asking.”

While Flint oscillated between giving in to Silver’s better judgment or addressing the subversiveness of his tone, a cannon shattered the stillness of the night.

Many of the crew on deck—in the middle of prepping the launches and working the rigging—flinched. Flint hurried to the port side and peered into the dark. Billy soon stopped beside him, handing him a spyglass.

“Saw a flash to the south, southwest,” he said. Flint fixed the glass to his eye and scanned the area.

Another round, the bloom of brief fire lighting up the source of it like a signal. He glimpsed the structure that housed the cannon: a squat stone tower that perched, alone, on a marshy island diagonal from their advancing position on the bay.

“A lookout,” he announced. “A warning. Three consecutive shots for a pirate vessel.”

No sooner had he spoken than the third cannon shot rang out. Silence returned to the bay; and, after a couple of minutes—enough time for a reload, if they had wished it—silence remained.

“Someone on the night-watch must have owl eyes,” Billy finally commented. “Though there goes our element of surprise.”

“Well,” said Silver, coming to rest against the rail on Flint’s other side. “That certainly is one way for them to realize we’re here.”

And by “them,” Flint knew Silver wasn’t referring to the colonists.

* * *

Despite being the invasion of a private holding, the raid on Salt Hope unfolded with the least amount of violence out of all the vanguard’s raids to date.

A token force fought back initially, of course; staff the owners had left behind, overseers. Sporadic bouts of gunshot among the outbuildings spoke of this resistance, but they petered out to the clatter of barrels and crates in the storehouses and the calls of the vanguard.

One group split off to the stores; another dispersed to the slaves’ cabins to alert them to the plantation’s coup d’état and to offer safe passage or work on the _Walrus_ , should any desire it. Flint observed Billy conferring with a moderately-sized cluster of people and nodded as he passed.

He went for the house itself. And where he went, Silver trailed behind him.

By the time they climbed the porch, Silver was panting for breath and favoring his leg to a significant degree. Flint didn’t slow down. He shoved open the front door and proceeded to check every room, even the pantry, pistol in hand.

Nothing; not even servants, having either fled or hidden well at the commotion outdoors. Or, more likely, having returned to the cabins on the other side of the property, bearing the designation “slave” rather than “servant.” No owners or overseers, in any case. The house lay deserted in fear of another strike by the Yamasee, as the rumors had predicted.

After a moment’s reflection, Flint decided to light the lamps and a few candles in the first-floor parlor. Their yellow glow would spill onto the yard outside, be visible from the edge of the woods. Serve as a signal of his own.

When he stepped back onto the porch, it was to find Silver slumped onto a chair, picking at where his leg met the metal of the peg. He stopped when he heard Flint’s boot treads draw near.

“Downright cozy,” Silver quipped, eyeing the windows.

Flint didn’t reply. He watched the trees and paced the porch like an animal in its cage.

Now they waited on strangers, on the potential for another unforeseen encounter. Flint had informed the crew of this much, at least: don’t fire on a trio of trespassers, a woman and two men, possibly traveling by either horse or foot. Not unless they fire on you first.

If the woman’s claims—and previous demonstration—held true, it shouldn’t matter either way. But Flint would try for a more cordial meeting this time.

Someone walked up to the base of the stairs. Billy, judging by the height.

“We’re ready to make transfers to the _Walrus_.” Definitely Billy. “Thirty-two people would like passage to Nassau. Sixteen will sail for us. They’re assisting us with gathering up supplies; there should be more than enough to cover everyone for the trip.”

“Good,” he said. He turned on his heel and stalked the length of the porch once more. “Remind the men that should our contacts come, Mr. Silver and I are not to be disturbed. Understood?”

“Understood, Captain,” Billy echoed, and withdrew. Though his expression, even obscured by the dark, reflected more doubt than understanding.

Flint and Silver both followed his shadow’s progress across the yard. Flint could practically sense Silver opening his mouth to say something about that exchange—but he didn’t have the opportunity.

A whistle went up. Another crewman jogged over. “Someone’s coming,” he called—Dobbs, by the sound of it. “Three by horse, from the northeastern field.”

Flint stopped at the top step. “Direct them to the house,” he replied. “Let them come.”

* * *

Three horses plodded across the yard. Three riders dismounted and hitched them nearby. Three figures approached the halo cast onto the porch by the parlor windows.

Flint waited, hands clasped at the small of his back. The nails of one bit into the palm of the other.

The woman climbed the stairs first. She was in trousers, her cropped hair tied in a low tail, her axe strapped to her back. A flintlock pistol hung from her belt. She took in Flint, Silver rising from his chair, and the lit house at a glance. “Quite the welcoming party,” she said, wry. “And quite the blow you’ve dealt Sir Johnson, upending his operation here like this.”

“I figured you’d approve,” he said, measured. “Considering what you’ve been up to.”

It was the first time he’d seen her face-to-face with any light source other than moon. Her eyes crinkled at the corners in trace amusement. “And what exactly do you think we’ve been up to?”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Silver chimed in, at the exact moment the two swordsmen stepped up behind her, both of their blades—broad and antiquated, exactly as Flint had observed that night in Beaufort—sheathed. The porch was becoming crowded.

“That would be us,” said one of the men. He grinned beneath a full beard, his black, curly hair loose about his chin. He carried himself with confidence and, in addition to the sword, had a bandolier of pouches slung across his chest that terminated at a belt supporting a dagger and a pistol of his own.

“Good evening,” added the second man. He was mostly clean-shaven with only a little bit of stubble, his brown hair longer than either of his companions’ and kept in a tie. There was an open sort of pleasantness to his expression that Flint immediately distrusted. He thought he detected an Italian accent; recalled the shouting in Italian after the confrontation at Beaufort. But neither the other man’s nor the woman’s English shared it—or shared _any_ accent in common, for that matter.

Perhaps proper introductions would resolve some of the mystery. But first, Flint nodded to the door. “Shall we speak in private?” he suggested.

She regarded him for a moment before cutting her attention to Silver. “Not him,” she said.

“I insist.” Though a disagreement was on Flint’s tongue, Silver beat him to it. He’d donned his wide, disarming smile beneath his scruff, although his shoulders were tense. He dipped them with a slight flourish of his hand as he said, “John Silver, quartermaster, at your service. And where my captain goes, I follow. Sometimes regrettably.”

The swordsman with the curly black hair huffed out a chuckle. The woman stared at Silver until he shifted his weight ever so subtly, though he was obviously refusing to be the first to break the prolonged eye contact.

Flint intervened. “He stays,” he said, a notch below an order. “You have someone, I have someone.”

“ _Two_ someones to my _one_ someone,” Silver added. “And I forgot my dueling sword at home. You have to admit, you have the better odds.”

The curly-haired man stepped forward and clapped a hand to the woman’s shoulder. She neither flinched nor acknowledged the gesture.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go inside. I wonder how a colonial slaver decorates his stolen home?”

* * *

It wasn’t the most surreal conference Flint had ever participated in, but it unquestionably ranked near the top of the list.

The parlor, as Flint had seen earlier, lacked much in the way of ornamentation. The wallpaper was a mustardy green, while the rug was a floral red and white. There was a modest landscape painting; a cabinet of ceramic figures and dishes; a grandfather clock gently _tick-tick-_ ticking in the corner; and a lace doily on the low-set table. On one side of it, an upholstered sofa rested beneath a window, the curtains of which were now closed. Two matching chairs flanked the table’s opposite side.

“It’s a little ugly,” the curly-haired man observed. He didn’t sound disappointed. Bemused, perhaps.

“Like their sins, _tesoro_ ,” the other man informed him.

Silver surreptitiously sent Flint a bewildered glance. He gave a tiny shake of his head in response, equally unsure what to make of the three. At least they weren’t shooting at them, which was more than could be said of their last meeting.

The three had sat upon the sofa, the curly-haired man at one end, the woman at the other, with the Italian situated in-between. Two swords and an axe leaned against their respective armrests. Flint and Silver had each taken a chair. The quiet, apart from the _tick_ , _tick_ , _tick_ emanating from the far corner, was starting to wear on Flint’s nerves.

He chose to open the discussion with the bluntness of a 12-pounder.

“You were right,” he said, looking at the woman. He could concede that much, he supposed. “I _am_ experiencing something that cannot be explained by ordinary means. And I do have questions. You know my name already, if only by reputation; now you know Mr. Silver’s. So I guess my first question is, who the fuck are you people?”

Curly Hair laughed. He thumbed at his own chest. “Yusuf Al-Kaysani.” He pressed the thumb to the other man’s shoulder, nudged him. “Nicolo di Genova,” he continued, then pointed behind the man’s head to the woman. “And Andromache.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” added Nicolo di Genova. Flint said nothing. Yusuf’s outstretched arm had settled, almost innocuously, on the back of the sofa behind Nicolo, almost upon his shoulders. Flint realized he was staring when Silver spoke, filling the lapse in the conversation for him.

“Pleasure,” he said. His expression had turned shrewd. “Andromache—beautiful name. Classical, isn’t it?”

An uptick to the corners of her lips. “Very,” she said, but did not elaborate. She leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees. “Tell me about the things you cannot explain,” she said to Flint.

There lay the contradiction, didn’t it? Flint scoffed to himself, even as he sorted through his thoughts. “You’ve seen them. Wounds begin to heal almost the moment after receiving them. Wounds heal that _shouldn’t_.”

“And the dreams?”

That brought him up short. His eyes narrowed. “What dreams?”

Andromache sat back with a sigh. “Right after you died for the first time,” she said impatiently. “You had to have seen us. We saw you—how else do you think we recognized you? Or found you?”

The words washed over him; heard, not absorbed. The room seemed to grow just a little bit smaller.

“Wait,” he managed—but, again, Silver was quicker.

“After he _died_ for the first time?” he asked. His knuckles stood out against his skin as his hands gripped the arms of the chair. “You’re saying he actually died.”

“Of course.”

Nicolo jumped in with, “After you died, we all saw similar things. Charles Town under siege and you in the midst of it, in chains, taking a bullet to the stomach.”

“It wasn’t difficult to learn your name,” Yusuf said. “Captain Flint, destroyer of civilization in Carolina.”

“Repairs are still being done—”

“That’s not possible,” Flint ground out. His jaw clenched so tight he felt it click.

They looked at him. He hated their stares.

“It is,” Nicolo said, almost tentative. “It’s slow going, but—”

“Not that,” he snapped. “I didn’t die. That isn’t possible.”

Not possible. Death only ever took, and took, and took, with a hunger as fathomless as the ocean. Nothing could dredge itself from its depths; nothing was spared its grasping undertow.

Least of all _him_.

Yusuf’s eyebrows bunched. “Healing is part of it,” he said, “but it goes beyond that. I’m sorry. How you fought, back in Beaufort—we thought that perhaps you’d already realized as much.”

“It hurts still.” Nicolo. “The pain doesn’t disappear. But for a fatal wound—we briefly become like the sleepers, only we wake again mere minutes after it happened. Sometimes less.”

“We don’t age,” Andromache concluded, with the finality of a hammer on a nail. A lid on a coffin. “We don’t die. Eventually we found one another. And now we’ve found you.”

He felt feverish: too hot, his palms sweating, and too chilled, a fine tremor working its way up his limbs. His mind tore itself between competing notions—laugh at the nonsense they were spouting? Leave the room? The house? Grab her by the shoulders, shake her, tell her—

Silver’s voice, and the others’, blurred around him, as if he were perceiving them from underwater. Sound and sense dropped away. Except—

_Tick_.

_Tick_.

_Tick_.

Flint stood, silencing whatever was being said. He stared into Andromache’s ice-blue eyes. “You’re lying,” he said.

Because he focused solely on her, he could see the fluctuation of her expression: the hints of frustration that froze into resolve. She stood.

“Shoot me if you don’t believe me,” she returned.

The scrape of a chair when Silver fumbled upright as well. “Now wait a second. No doubt this is a lot to absorb, and we have much to discuss, but let’s not be hasty here.”

Flint didn’t move. Couldn’t, was rooted to the spot. Andromache tapped a finger to the middle of her forehead.

“Go ahead,” she said. By all appearances calm, if it weren’t for the coiled tension in her stance. “You shot me before. Why hesitate now?”

“You _shot_ her?” Silver exclaimed.

He did have his pistol on him, tucked away in his coat. But he wouldn’t draw. It just wasn’t possible.

Not possible. Not wanted.

None of it was what he wanted.

Andromache curled her lip. In a fluid motion, she pulled her pistol free from her belt and pointed it at Silver, who stepped back, hands immediately raised.

“Who will it be? Me or him? Who will get back up again, do you think?”

“Andromache!” shouted Nicolo, rising to his feet. But Flint paid the other two no more attention.

His vision tunneled on the barrel of her gun. His blood pounded in his skull, his breath too loud and uneven.

He shoved himself in front of Silver. The words very nearly ripped themselves from his throat. “Leave him out of this!”

“Fine.” She shrugged. Her aim shifted minutely, just as her finger tightened on the trigger.

Silver’s voice, ragged—“ _No!_ ”—overlaid by the burst of the shot.

Explosive pain. Up, down—he fell.

Nothing.

_Tick_.

_Tick_.

* * *

Hands on his shoulders. Frigid, thin, like bone. They grasped his clothes, yanked him up and forward in order to drag him. Where?

He opened his eyes. The ripped and peeling shroud of darkness made manifest: black sackcloth, the faceless face. Not a face, but not cloth, either. Textured and solid; a carapace.

The touch left him abruptly. Perhaps it removed itself from him. Or, perhaps, he was removed from it.

Near his ear, a woman’s voice—one he knew all too well.

_“No—”_

* * *

“No. No, no, no.”

Flint lay there in darkness, baffled how he got there. Gradually sensation returned, much like feeling rushing into a leg or arm after it fell asleep. He tried to open his eyes—only to blink at the dryness and itch in them. They were already open.

A wet drop fell on his cheek. A face was peering down at him, framed by long curly hair. Rough hands cradled his face; his head was pillowed on something vaguely soft and warm that smelled like sea-salt and days-old sweat.

He stirred. Groaned, when his nerve endings all reported pain.

Pain. Why was he—?

Her.

Panic struck through him. He struggled to sit up, but the hands jumped to his chest and urged him down again.

“No, stay still, relax. I’ve got you.”

Silver. It was Silver’s voice, thick and tearful, and Flint was flat on his back, his head in the man’s lap, in the parlor of the Salt Hope plantation. And across the room—

_Her_.

No amount of coaxing would keep him subdued now. He scrambled to a sitting position, forcing his way up through Silver’s grip. He felt his hand on his back, still, offering support as Flint struggled to suck air into his lungs and took stock of the room.

Silver at his back, the length of the metal peg stretched out before him. The woman, sitting again on the sofa. Nicolo crouched nearby, out of range, concern etched across his face. Yusuf standing behind him, a frown turned on the woman.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he told her. “Not like that. Not in front of his friend.”

“Didn’t—‘ _didn’t have to_ do _that_ ’?” Silver bit out around harsh, gasping breaths. “You bastards. You monsters.”

Gingerly, Flint brushed his fingers over his forehead. Edged the circle of raw and sensitive skin over newly-knitted bone. He drew his hand back. Examined the blood on his fingertips.

“And I’m one of them,” he breathed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Andy has ZERO CHILL
> 
> This chapter was made possible in part by obscure publications from SC historical societies and a lot of old maps! Salt Hope was a real plantation at this time and location, but I play fast and loose with specifics re: layout, access to the coast, etc. Forgive a little bit of handwaving. ;) Everything about Christ Church Parish, the Yamasee War, and the Martello tower on Bulls Island, on the other hand, all come directly from my research!


	4. In Spite of the Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An offer is extended, and bitter truths aren’t fully swallowed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry for the delay! This chapter fought me at every turn for some reason—I’m going to blame Flint for that lol. But I hope you all enjoy, and thank you as ever for your continued readership! :)
> 
> Note that some new character tags have been added . . .

Time slipped through Flint’s grasp like sand. Silver snatched the doily from the parlor table and dabbed at the blood on Flint’s face. Flint could have done it himself, but this way guaranteed not a speck remained for anyone on the crew to discover. Or so Silver muttered, anyway. He had the jittery, wide-eyed energy of someone startled from a bad dream. Flint let him do as he wished.

Especially after he’d had to help Silver off the floor. Dropping suddenly to Flint’s side, after the shot had struck home, had done his stump no favors. His face had contorted in a moment of uncontrolled pain after Flint had hauled him upright and more of his weight had borne against the peg leg.

He’d suppressed it soon enough. He wadded up the doily and tossed it onto the rug.

“All better,” he said with forced cheer. Which dropped when he said to the room, “We’re done here,” with a touch to Flint’s elbow to turn him towards the door.

Nicolo was lingering nearby. He’d looked sorely tempted to assist them, especially when Silver had struggled to stand, but he’d apparently thought better of it. “You’re leaving?” he asked.

“Well we’re not fucking waiting around to be shot again, that’s for damn sure,” Silver spat. Flint distantly noted how unusual it was, to earn that level of outright vitriol from him.

“We aren’t going to hurt you.” Yusuf this time, arms crossed over his chest.

“Little late for that.” Silver herded him into the foyer.

He was opening the door when, finally, she spoke.

“What would you like to be done with it?” she asked.

Flint frowned; could barely parse her meaning. “What did you say?” he asked, his voice a rasp.

When he looked back into the parlor, she was still seated on the sofa, finger idly tracing over the wood of the armrest. Gaze locked on a bare patch of wall.

“The house,” she said. Glanced his way before resuming her study of the wallpaper. “You’re going back to your ship. Before you go, what do you want to be done with the house?”

Every movement and every thought trudged their way through Flint’s brain like wading through a fog. Even so, he was able to glean something from the question. As though the question itself, by its asking, implied that she thought something _should_ be done; as though, by posing it to _him_ , she was extending some gesture he couldn’t quite decipher.

He had neither the presence of mind nor the capacity to analyze it further than that. And there was really only one response, anyway:

“Burn it to the ground,” he said.

* * *

Despite himself—and Silver’s insistence—Flint wanted to _see_ it burn.

He was aware of the final transfers to the _Walrus_ being conducted behind him. Realized that, before too much longer, he and Silver would have to join them and traverse the bay on the last of the launches.

But for now, he stood in the yard and watched the roof partially collapse into flames.

He was aware of someone coming to stand beside him on his right. Not Silver; the tread was too surefooted and even across the grass, and last Flint checked he was consulting with Billy, anyway. About the launches, their new acquaintances, the possibility of armed conflict with the latter—Flint had no idea.

“You’re angry.”

Damn. It was her.

He couldn’t decide if she was referring to what she’d done to him or if she was speaking in generalities. Didn’t matter. He didn’t answer—just watched the flames.

A window shattered. Andromache observed the spectacle beside him for another minute before speaking again.

“Or maybe you’re just tired of it. Sometimes they bleed together. I get it; I’ve cycled through them, one after the other, countless times.”

“How many times?” escaped his mouth. His voice still sounded rough to his ears.

When he turned his head towards her, her face was aglow in the light of the fire. Her features were sculpted composure.

“Too many,” she said.

A non-answer, but one that nonetheless drained whatever dregs of resentment he might have harbored against her. A non-answer that, in that moment, reflected back at him like a mirror of his own unthinkable future. A future of cycles, of countless times. _Too many_.

He asked, “Are you familiar with Nassau?”

“I’ve heard of it. I’ve also heard you’re at the crux of something big down there. A place all its own, that maybe someday could be safe from the colonial powers-that-be.”

Half the porch crumpled in on itself, spurring a tongue of fire to lap at the night sky. He nodded.

She asked, “Is that why you’ve been hunting the magistrates? The ones who hang pirates?”

“It relates. More than that, it’s the reason I can’t go with you.”

The fire crackled. Timber popped. When she didn’t answer, Flint added, “You asked me to. In Beaufort.”

“You told me ‘no’ then, too. With a flintlock.”

“This is the reason.”

Another stretch of quiet between them. Andromache seemed to be thinking. After a minute or two, she heaved a long, drawn-out sigh.

“Nicolo and Yusuf were never this much trouble. You are going to be one hell of a thorn in my ass, Flint.”

He scowled, more in confusion than offense. “What the hell are you talking about?”

She turned to face him directly, crossing her arms.

“You can’t come with us? You’re embroiled in a lost cause of your own? Fine. That’s exactly the kind of thing we get involved in, anyway.”

His mind blanked. Perhaps the bullet had damaged his hearing, but he couldn’t make sense of her intentions. “What are you saying?”

A second sigh. “I’m talking about us coming with you to your Nassau. I’m talking about _helping_ you.”

“You shot me.”

“Yet here you are.” She almost gave a half-smile, but quickly hid it underneath his glare.

“What do you care about Nassau?”

She shrugged. “Turns out I care for England much, much less.”

A fair point. One that she, along with Yusuf and Nicolo, had already proved by their aiding the Yamasee against the Carolinian colonists. And by her personally slitting the throat of Beaufort’s magistrate without hesitation.

Even so, Flint wasn’t convinced.

But he also wasn’t moved to argue.

It just didn’t matter.

Somehow she sensed his ambivalence. She scrutinized him and said, “You’re a new immortal. An infant, really, who hasn’t learned yet what the rules are. But like it or not, you’re one of us now. We’ll look out for you if you’ll let us.”

_Immortal_. The word alone dredged up a yawning emptiness in his chest. A coldness, in spite of the fire.

“Do what you like,” he said.

A wall of the house caved in, streaming smoke and ash.

* * *

_The dream plays out behind his eyelids. Not for the first time; an occasional phantom ever since its first occurrence—ever since his first death, he supposes._

_Salt water stings the roof of his mouth, the back wall of his throat. He chokes on it, allowing the flow into his lungs._

_Nothingness. Then wakefulness, the same strip of blue-blackish light in front of his face, whereas all else is solid iron. The same unbearable pressure on his ears, his chest._

_He startles. Fists fly into view and slam against the metal. They are smaller than his own, bloodied with sloughing skin._

_An anguished, guttural cry sears along his vocal cords. But it isn’t his voice._

* * *

The nightmare that once was occasional seemed, that night at least, somehow more relentless.

* * *

It’d been easy enough to excuse the presence of three additional passengers when a total of forty-eight new faces had come aboard from Salt Hope plantation. The excuse Flint landed on was that the trio were experienced mercenaries and strategists who would fight against England and lend their services in defense of Nassau. Like all good lies, it held mostly truth to it, though no one save Silver and Flint knew the whole truth.

Andromache had been firm about that. “No one can learn about us—or you,” she’d said. “Forget piracy; for this you would hang, burn, and whatever else they can think of in a heartbeat.”

Her vehemence seemed to bespeak experience. Flint left the matter alone for now.

Silver, however, could not bring himself to let the subject of the trio rest.

He followed Flint into his cabin. When the door was closed, he said before Flint had even reached his chair, “I don’t like this.”

It was mid-afternoon, but Flint desperately needed a drink. Especially if they were having this conversation. He produced a decent bottle of rum and, after a moment’s weighing it, two glasses rather than one.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” he replied.

“Hmm, where shall I start?” He scrunched his features in a show of deep thought. He hadn’t deigned to sit, but rather stood behind the chair opposite Flint’s and gripped the back of it with both hands. “Oh yes, I remember: she _shot_ you.”

“I was there.” Having poured a measure in each glass, he slid one across the desk to Silver, who scarcely glanced at it.

“Then we should share the same concerns. We don’t know these people, their agendas, what they’re capable of. Their stories. They aren’t terribly forthcoming with information—”

“Maybe,” Flint interrupted after a sip of his drink—the rum tingling down his throat, stinging almost like salt. “Maybe there isn’t much information to tell.”

Silver threw his hands up. “Who can say! That woman claimed not to _age_. Do you know what the other two told me yesterday? That they were in the _Crusades_.”

He paused, as if to let that sink in. It did, but Flint no longer felt the capacity for amazement.

“That’s hundreds of years,” he added at Flint’s continued blankness.

“Yes. I can do my figures, too.”

“The Crusades!”

Flint tilted his drink this way and that, watching the liquid swirl around the glass. He frowned. “Is that how they _met_?” he blurted. Didn’t necessarily mean to; it was just too strange a notion to contain. They seemed so . . . comfortable with each other.

_Knock-knock-knock_.

They exchanged a glance, though the emotion from each was entirely different. Flint called out, “Enter.”

Speak of the devil, Andromache stepped into the cabin, firmly shutting the door behind her. She seemed unfazed by the possibility of interrupting—strolled over to the desk, in fact, as if they had a prior appointment.

Without preamble she said, “I was thinking you should tell me more about Nassau. Give me a better idea what we’ll be dealing with before we get there.”

Silver slowly turned towards her. “Actually,” he began, in the blithe manner of a man determined to prod a bear with a harpoon, “the Captain and I were just discussing that very same thing: better learning what it is that we’re now dealing with.”

Christ, what an impending disaster. Flint knocked his drink back.

“Were you?” Andromache’s mocking levity was practically palpable. “What were you hoping to learn?”

The chair rattled under Silver’s hands as he straightened. “Can’t age, can’t be hurt, can’t be killed. See, I know what _I_ would do if I were granted such a gift, and it wouldn’t include anywhere near the amount of pity campaigns you and your friends seem to engage in for no discernible gain. Why press back against the colonial powers? Why follow us to Nassau? Why choose _this_?”

Quiet, aside from the creaking of the _Walrus_ as it swayed over the waves. Reaching for the rum bottle, Flint did his damnedest to pretend none of them in the room currently existed, himself included.

Despite his best efforts, he nonetheless heard it when Andromache shifted her weight; saw it, when the sunlight through the window flashed off one of the blades of her axe. “There isn’t a choice,” she answered. “Not for us. And not for you, either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Why trouble yourself with how I’m using my own many, many fucking years? You don’t have them, and you never will.”

The silence dropped like an anchor. Flint grimaced into his glass. Maybe if he _did_ interject, he could make them leave sooner?

“This is not a ‘pity campaign,’” he said, in a hopeless bid to sweep away Andromache’s words. But he went unacknowledged.

Silver’s face was drawn into a terrible storm of smothered emotion. He stood too still and stared at Andromache too intensely, a tendon jumping in his jaw. When he spoke, his voice faintly shook.

“That’s it? This can’t be shared, or earned, or gained? You three—four—are very nearly like gods, but to hell with the rest of us? We crawl through the dirt and bleed all our blood and _that’s it_?”

Andromache shrugged. “I didn’t say that. All I know is, no, there is no way anyone can give you what we have. I don’t even know how we have it.” She paused. “But it wouldn’t bring your leg back, anyway. You already lost it.”

They watched each other for a long moment. Then with the rapid thump of metal on wood, Silver strode to the door and slammed it behind him.

Flint eyed the door critically, ran a finger along the rim of his glass. “You have a shitty way of breaking news to people,” he observed.

Andromache dropped into the vacant chair. “Don’t sneer at me,” she quipped back, and plucked the second—still full—glass from the desk and downed it in one. She sighed, then continued, “What good would it do to string his hopes along when there’s nothing for him here? Besides, you’re the one who involved him in the first place.”

Something in his chest clenched. Nothing for him here—he resented how that sounded. For Silver’s sake perhaps, but it also rang true for himself in some hollow way.

It didn’t matter.

He abandoned the subject. “You mentioned dreams, at the plantation,” he said instead.

“Yes. And then you panicked.”

He didn’t snap at the bait. “I did dream of you three once. Right after I—right after. But there’s another one, one that’s never gone away. Not completely. And it’s gotten worse ever since we set sail for Nassau.”

He hadn’t even described the dream yet, but she was already frowning as though troubled. It was an incongruous expression for her, someone who so far had shown only varying shades of apathy. Perhaps it was unusual for them to have a recurring vision; perhaps the toneless way he’d dropped the words had struck her as being unlike _him_.

“Describe it,” she said.

In his head he called up the imagery, the weight and the cold. It seemed not too dissimilar to the leaden ice currently coiled behind his ribs. His gaze drifted to a corner of the room.

“I see it from my own view,” he began, softly. “But it isn’t me. Not really; or maybe not yet. We lie underneath the waves, way down, in the silt. Maybe even at the very end of the ocean. And someone is—”

He stopped. The garbled scream echoed back to him, a phantom.

“Someone is trapped there,” he said, grip tightening around his glass. “Imprisoned in a coffin, but they aren’t dead. Not always. They live, and drown, and live again to drown a minute later. The sea is their tomb. And it’ll be mine too, most likely. Won’t it?”

If he closed his eyes, he was almost there again: the bloodied stubs for fingernails, the watery dark, the intermittent stream of bubbles ripped from the throat. Was this what Captain Flint’s sins upon the sea had bought him? Would he never truly escape it? Was this the counterweight to his newfound goddamned _immortality_?

The loud grate of wood against wood.

Andromache stood, skin ashen, teeth bared, eyes wild. Her breath heaved in a shallow and irregular rhythm.

Flint’s hand inched towards the pistol in the lower drawer of the desk.

In all their encounters, Flint had never witnessed this depth of emotion from her. If he had cared to identify it now, he might call it _distress_.

“It means something to you,” he said. The obvious conclusion.

She gritted her teeth. Forcibly calmed herself. When she spoke, though, her voice was slightly strangled.

“We’ll talk about Nassau later,” she said, and crossed to the door, leaving as if he were the one dismissed from the conversation.

In less than an hour, two people had fled this room in a state of emotional upset. Neither interaction had done him any favors, either. But it was a lot harder for him to flee himself.

Flint finished his drink, collected the glasses and bottle, and stowed them away.

* * *

Describing Nassau in words could only do so much to prepare someone for the real thing: flashy and smelly in all its (egregiously exposed) flesh, an assault on all senses.

The crew of the _Walrus_ jostled each other and shouted and clamored around the deck, spirits high to be back in a friendly port. Flint took in the docks, shacks, and palms of Nassau, and he remembered—as if he had forgotten; as if he could ever forget—there was no longer anyone waiting for him here.

He neatly folded and packed those thoughts away, pushed them into a corner of his mind as though they were old linens to be placed in storage. He couldn’t afford distraction. He had a far less pleasant task awaiting him than the carousing his crew had planned, and it would require his full focus.

As soon as the launch docked, he led a small group—the three, himself, and Silver—across the beach. They’d barely cleared the docks when his singular focus already came under threat.

“Is that the fort?” asked Yusuf suddenly.

Flint didn’t break his stride, though felt his shoulders tense in anticipatory annoyance. “If it’s large, stone, and on a hill, then yes. Why?”

“Has the outer wall always been compromised by gaping holes, or are those new?”

That drew Flint up short. He pivoted on his heel and followed Yusuf’s (insufferably wry) stare across the bay.

And there it was, the crown of Nassau’s hopes for self-governance: patched haphazardly in places, but overall much the same as when Flint had left it weeks ago. A fort half-demolished; a fort incapable of protecting a pigeon from a strong breeze, let alone millions in Spanish gold.

Flint caught himself gawking before his expression contorted.

Rackham.

“Your lack of fortifications may present a strategic problem,” offered Nicolo.

No shit. He was going to _kill_ Rackham.

“Although it isn’t quite as terrible as I was expecting,” he continued.

“Do we _want_ to know what the supposed crusader had been expecting?” Silver muttered from Flint’s side. Flint shook his head and kept walking, scarcely waiting to ensure the others were following in his wake.

“I’m going to kill Rackham,” he said aloud.

“Rackham?” Yusuf echoed. “Is this the one responsible for your fort?”

“The one responsible for seeing to its repairs,” said Silver. “And, no, its present state is . . . not new.”

Andromache was quiet. She pushed forward to keep pace with Flint, her eyes tracking over the milling crowds of sailors, merchants, and girls of the street. When she spoke, her words were almost lost in the noise. “Are the people of Nassau as concerned over its fate as you are?”

The cavalier business as usual and free spirits of the street—combined with their pitiful excuse for a fort—would indeed raise doubt. Apparently not even millions in gold could motivate this island to action rather than frivolity.

Flint didn’t have an answer for her. Didn’t dare distract his tenuous hold over his self-control in order to consider what it meant for the island to still— _still_ —seem so ill-prepared.

He managed, “We’ll soon find out,” and picked up their pace towards the governor’s mansion.

He was going to wring the answers out of Rackham’s neck.

They were nearly to the tavern when Andromache spoke again. She jutted her chin up and to the right in gesture as she said, “Someone you know?”

At the same moment, a voice cried out, “Wait! Captain Flint! Don’t go in there!”

Flint paused in his march. From the direction Andromache had indicated—and from which the shout had sounded—a tall and lanky figure came barreling down the street towards them. Because fate often possessed a cruel sense of humor, Flint wasn’t surprised to identify the disheveled shape as being none other than Jack Rackham, with Anne Bonny trailing him at a more sedate pace.

Rackham halted before them, out of breath and hands aflutter as if debating whether to reach out in greeting. When Flint curled his lip and took a large step back, his hands settled at his belt and pockets, fussing with the material restlessly.

“Hi, yes, hello,” babbled Rackham. “Captain, Captain Flint. How nice to see you. You’re actually back early—sooner than expected, I would say?”

He glanced to Anne as if seeking confirmation. Her stolid, vaguely displeased expression didn’t waver.

“Much sooner,” Rackham somehow concluded from it. “Not that we aren’t delighted to see you, of course. And you’ve brought friends! How wonderful. It’s just—”

“Just what,” Flint ground out. Another thought occurred to him. “And don’t go in _where_?”

Rackham’s mouth opened, then clicked shut again. Anne sighed. “Would you just tell him already,” she said.

“Well, you see, I thought it might be prudent if I were to prepare you—and your guests—you see, we’ve had a visitor ourselves recently, and knowing your shared history—”

His words faded from Flint’s notice. Movement at the tavern door beyond Rackham’s shoulder caught his eye.

Flint stilled.

A man filled the doorway like an expansive shadow, all dark cloak, dark beard, and bandolier and belt bristling with pistols and sword both. Flint knew him in an instant.

The recognition was mutual. The man’s baritone cut over Rackham’s words. “There you are, Flint. I began to wonder which colonial hovel you’d crawled off to.”

Distantly, he heard Rackham mutter, “Well, fuck. Never mind, then.” But he paid him no mind.

His blood burned beneath his skin. His lips pulled into a snarl.

“Teach.”


End file.
